" ... [I]f construction ever begins, opponents say they are willing to participate in civil disobedience. But opponents in Nebraska are betting that they can block the pipeline through other means ... five days of hearing on the project in August."

Trump visited the C.I.A. He compared them to Nazis. He said the media had invented his feud with the agency. He lashed out at suggestions that his inaugural crowds hadn't been the biggest and most orgiastic. To top it all off, he crowed about how often he'd claimed the cover of Time magazine, because who isn't fascinated by that? Whose heart doesn't beat faster when Trump yet again ponders the glory of Trump?

He was president at that point. Vindicated. Inaugurated. He could decide to be big. But he chose to be small, and it was clear then, if it hadn't been before, that there would be no pivot to dignity, which was either beyond his capabilities or outside his interests."

" ... [Trump] has unwittingly created a new movement in American politics, as Democrats channel the sort of all-encompassing outrage that has long fueled grass-roots conservatism.

... [T]here is no comparison between the conservative demonization of Mr. Obama and the progressive case against Mr. Trump. People on the right saw Mr. Obama as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim with a hidden agenda to hobble American power and a health care reform plan to establish 'death panels.' None of that is true.

People on the left believe that Mr. Trump has incited hatred against minorities, and boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. Democrats think that the president and his family are blatantly profiting off the presidency and that he welcomed the help of a hostile foreign power during the election . All this is grounded in fact."

So far, the lesson of this presidency is that when it comes to building political power, love does not, in fact, trump hate."

Saturday, April 29, 2017

"[S]mall acts and mutual threats of war can lead to miscalculation. Only hours before Mr. Trump spoke, the North released a propaganda video showing the White House shattering apart in what looked like a nuclear blast. No one takes those videos seriously, but they indicate a state of mind in which every action has to have a reaction."

"The interim leader that Marine Le Pen chose to run her far-right party while she ran for the presidency has been forced to step down because he praised a Holocaust denier and expressed doubt that the Nazis used poison to murder Jews."

France -- I am certain -- is filled with good people who will instinctually make "the right choice" next month. I am certain.

[me in October 2016]: Our country -- I am certain -- is filled with good people who will instinctually make "the right choice" next month. I am certain.

"President Trump could save tens of millions of dollars in a single year under his proposed changes to the tax code, a New York Times analysis has found."

!$#^&$$#@+_%

"In the Affordable Care Act, Congress introduced a 3.8 percent tax on investment income, which took effect in 2013. Repealing the tax could save about $1.5 million for somone with Mr. Trump's investment income."

"And what of his central campaign pledge, to make America great again, presumably by creating vast numbers of jobs for those who helped elect him? This may prove the emptiest of his promises. The giant infrastructure program, which would indeed yield jobs, is nowhere to be seen. In its place are proposed tax cuts to benefit mainly the wealthy and photo-op executive orders to deregulate energy businesses that, even if sustained by the courts -- a long shot -- will merely enrich the likes of the Koch brothers."

"His determination to leverage his office to expand his commercial empire is the only objective to which Americans, after 100 days, can be confident this president will stay true."

"Privacy experts cautioned it could reveal too much about a person's background and preferences and sounds like a security question -- name the first concert you attended -- that you might be asked on a banking, brokerage or similar website to verify your identity."

I love this meme. By telling you that the first rock concert I ever attended was "Traffic" at the Civic Arena, you may attempt to hack me by figuring out that I'm from Pittsburgh and perhaps I love Stevie Winwood. Must have "sw" in my password, huh?

"'Daddy, I saw you hit a home run,' Holliday's 3-year-old son, Reed, shouted in the Yankees clubhouse.

But Holliday was more impressed by the home runs he had seen come off the bat of Judge.

'Maybe I'm overstating it a bit,' Holliday said. 'But as far as raw talent goes, that dude is massive. I haven't seen anything else like it. The whole stadium stops when he comes to bat. I think the sky's the limit for his potential.'"

"Researchers in Europe have found that the larvae of a common insect have an unusual ability to digest plastic, a discovery that could lead to biotechnical advances that help deplete the continual buildup of one of the world's most stubborn pollutants."

"The hopeful news is that many centrist Republicans ... have ... grave reservations about the House bill, in particular the attack on people with pre-existing conditions. It will be up to them to stop their party from jumping off the deep end and jeopardizing the health care of millions of Americans."

"President Trump's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, on Wednesday announced plans to eliminate net neutrality (technically, make it 'voluntary') despite its popularity, record of success and acceptance by most of the industry."

"[The] Kushner Companies would spend about $190 million ... on dozens of apartment buildings in tony Lower Manhattan neighborhoods including the East Village, the West Village and SoHo."

"[I]t turns out the money came from a member of Israel's Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world's leading diamond traders."

......................

"In 2014, the Guinean government alleged that Mr. Steinmet'z company had obtained the rights through corrupt practices, paying more than $8 million in cash through a representative to Mamadie Touré, then the wife of the dictator Lansana Conté."

"'The only so-called communication between Pyongyang and Washington is the threat of military force in the form of B-1 bombers, nuclear aircraft carriers, missiles and nuclear tests ... This dangerous situation threatens everyone in the region."

"[T]he skimpy one-page tax proposal his administration released on Wednesday is, by any historical standard, a laughable stunt by a gang of plutocrats looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the country's future."

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

"Isolated acts of kindness by bad actors like PT Sawit Sumbermas Sarana (a major Indonesian palm oil company) don't erase that history and current pattern of destructive behavior, and they won't save the Borneo orangutan from destruction."

Baby steps are important. The next step is much bigger. Decrease and then ultimately cease destroying natural habitat. Figure it out. Keep their human feet to the human fire.

"When Sierra Williams was in the sixth grade, teachers spotted her potential and enrolled her in the Neighborhood Academic Initiative, or N.A.I., a program through which U.S.C. prepares underprivileged kids who live relatively near its South Los Angeles campus for higher education.

Sierra, 20, just finished her junior year at U.S.. An engineering major, she's already enrolled in a master's program. 'My end goal is to get my Ph.D.,' she told me when I met her recently."

Good luck, Sierra. The entire world is rooting for you. Well, maybe not the ones who are pushing for a 15% corporate tax rate -- but most of us are!

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

"In case anyone was wondering, President Trump wants it known that he does not care about the false judgment of his administration after just 100 days. 'It's an artificial barrier,' he sniffed the other day. 'Not very meaningful,' he scoffed. A 'ridiculous standard,' he added on Twitter."

"So how is Mr. Trump spending his final week before the artificial and ridiculous 100-day point of his presidency? [B]y a White House program of first-100-days briefings, first-100-days receptions, a first-100-days website and a first-100-days rally."

"After sending more than 13,000 Twitter messages in less than three years, Jon Feere, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, suddenly went silent after Inauguration Day ... [H]e now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency tasked with finding and deporting people living in the United States illegally."

"There was palpable relief in mainstream Europe on Monday at the success of the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the French presidential elections, and a wide assumption that he will defeat the far-right Marine Le Pen in a runoff two weeks from now."

"We mourn, we remember, we pray and we pledge: never again. I say it, never again. The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror and the loss. Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide. They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe, and that the human heart cannot bear.

We must stamp out prejudice and anti-Semitism everywhere it is found. We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel's destruction. We cannot let that ever even be thought of."

Actions speak louder than ...

Nevertheless, with this on the record -- I'd like to give the dude a chance to make good on these words.

Every future action can be compared and contrasted to his fine, lofty verbage above. WE WILL HOLD HIS FEET TO THE FIRE.

"It would be encouraging to see Ms. Haley take on this cause with as much passion and perseverance as her predecessor, Samantha Power. Without American leadership, forging a global consensus that gay rights are human rights will take longer. Time is not on the side of gay people living in terror in places like Chechnya."

"'If somebody had taken me from rural Illinois, where I grew up, and dropped me here into this desert landscape to see all these fat succulent things,' said Jon P. Rebman, the chief botanist at the San Diego Natural History Museum and a cactus taxonomist, 'I would have thought I was on Mars.'"

Nearly the exact words my late grandmother said when she first came to visit us here in Tucson several decades ago.

"A pole-vaulting runway extends about 125 feet from the side of the Duplantis family's Acadian-style home, under a gate and into the backyard, where it ends at a foam landing pit, floodlit by a light made for an oil rig."

'It's not safe, I don't think,' said his father, Greg, a lawyer."

After competing in pole vault in Junior High School track, my younger brother and I proceeded to set an old metal bar between niches in a cherry tree and some stakes and we would jump to our heart's content.

Naturally, my favorite part was when the bar got to a height where my brother would be sure to completely wipe out.

"Fifteen years ago, when Ms. Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked his compatriots by breaking through to the second round and again knocking out the Socialist Party, some Socialist voters went to the polls with clothespins on their noses, as they voted for the scandal-plagued candidate of the center-right, Jacques Chirac. Mr. Le Pen was dealt a crushing defeat."

"Recent attacks on people of Indian descent in the United States are explosive news in India. A country once viewed as the promised land now seems for many to be dangerously inhospitable."

It would be nice if Chuck Lorre (Big Bang Theory) would give Raj a line or two about this. But don't hold your breath -- it's likely he wouldn't want to risk insulting his many Trump supporters who watch the show.

But I still think he could stick something in. Maybe the phrase "thick-headed fundamentalists" or something. Or maybe he could say it in Sanskrit.

"'It didn't hurt him: I would have liked to have stoned him to death or something horrible. He just got a shot like you were going to have some surgery. It was too easy, for all of the pain he caused my family all of these years.'"

There is a fantastic solution for all this.

Life in prison without possibility of parole.

That would be "something horrible" because the killer would have to actually exist and live with his crime for the rest of his "natural" life. And I put "natural" in quotes, because living in a (hopefully) tiny prison cell for LIFE is much more "horrible" for the criminal than the multi-drug ritual which calmly puts these people to sleep.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

"[M]aybe the only thing that could relieve our national anxieties is if something bad happening to us -- something so clarifyingly awful that we're forced to become solemn and still and agree about it."

"The map imagined the city in the year 2072, after 60 years of rapid sea-level rise totaling 200 feet.

"On the most fundamental level ... we are already adapting to climate change through a kind of tacit acquiescence, the way people in a city like Beijing accept that simply breathing the air outside can make them sick. 'People are aware -- they're coughing and wheezing ... but they're not staging political revolutions.' Neither are we.

"For the past few years, the Harvard professor David Keith has been sketching this vision: Ten Gulfstream jets, outfitted with special engines that allow them to fly safely around the stratosphere at an altitude of 70,000 feet, take off from a runway near the Equator. Their cargo includes thousands of pounds of a chemical compound ... that can be sprayed as a gas from the aircraft ... [I]f things go right, the gas converts to an aerosol of particles that remain aloft and scatter sunlight for two years. The payoff? A slowing of the earth's warming -- for as long as the Gulfstream flights continue.

"'Should you consider what you're about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?' an adviser asked him. [Comey replied], 'If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we're done,' he told the agents."

Many paragraphs later:

"[Harry Reid]: '[I]t has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States.'

Mr. Comey knew the investigation of the Trump campaign was just underway, and keeping with policy, he said nothing about it."

"Mr. Saleh described the lengths he had taken to find cigarettes under the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and the thrill it had given him to break its rules."

Freedom Fags.

I continue to be flummoxed by The Times insistence on that stupid phrase. Agree on one term (including Daesh which they seem to have dropped) and use it consistently and exclusively. I think we all know what you mean by now.

"At the Naraha school, which was being constructed when the disaster hit, workers destroyed a foundation that had just been laid and started over, removing mounds of dirt in an effort to decontaminate the site."

So it's completely safe for the kids, right? You're sure?

I'd feel better if the article had reported that the president of Tokyo Electric had sent his kids there.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

"[This attack] has also provided a potent opportunity for conservatives, primarily Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front, to use the violence to try to stoke hostility toward immigrants and Muslims, as well as fears about whether citizens can be protected from terror."

Let's see how eager she is to memorialize the tragic death of this policeman, who was gay. The Times published a touching sidebar about the man, Xavier Jugelé.

"Friday was the first full day since the height of the Industrial Revolution that Britain did not burn coal to generate electricity, a development that officials and climate change activists celebrated as a watershed moment."

"Some countries have already left coal behind in power generation. In Switzerland, Belgium and Norway, 'every day is a coal-free day,' ... a coal analyst ... pointed out."

Hello, Mr. President? Hello? Quit deluding those poor coal miners.

Coming soon: a Carrier air conditioners-type stunt. He'll save a few jobs at some dilapidated mine in West Virginia, while 99% of the rest wonder about their unemployment benefits.

" ... Mr. Sisi might have accepted the warm White House embrace [Obama had refused to allow Sisi to visit because of human rights concerns] in exchange for a prisoner who was about to be freed by the court system anyway."

Do your duty,show kindness to othersand keep them from suffering.

-- Avadana Sutta
Trump certainly isn't the first president to smile politely at a dictator. But I think he actually did a good thing here.

"On May 7 in Boston, Mr. Obama will accept the Profile in Courage Award given annually by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. He will deliver a speech at the library's black-tie dinner. His remarks -- built around the theme of what courage means in today's world -- will not name Mr. Trump."

Friday, April 21, 2017

"[The documentary] wastes no time turning polemical. 'In the whole history of the world, I think there have only been two great women directors, Leni Riefenstahl and Lina Wertmüller,' the critic John Simon says minutes in.

"Uganda began withdrawing its entire contingent of 1,500 soldiers from the Central African Republic this week, effectively ending the hunt for the warlord Joseph Kony and his guerrilla group, the Lord's Resistance Army."

When I was a kid, I collected stamps. One of the most beautiful stamps I ever saw was a rectangular one from Afghanistan. I distinctly remember how exotic and unknown the country was to most people then.

My brother served in the Peace Corps in Central African Republic in the early 70's. He helped build a schoolhouse in N'Délé. Back then, no one had heard of CAR.

"I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power ..."

Here you go, Mr. S -- I hope this awakens you to the ever complex nature of how our country is put together. This is a state which is one of 50 which forms our nation. Study it well.

Too bad. Imagine what Mr. Christ might have said to Mr. Trump concerning his travel bans and military adventurism:

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

"'It's not like taking a cough medicine that may have something in it,' he said. 'You're taking the time to have somebody either do it for you or you do it yourself, inject something, whether it's a B-12 shot or a cortisone shot or whatever you think it may be.'"

"With no political party to speak of, and never having held elective office, Mr. Macron, 39, a onetime investment banker and former economy minister, is leading an improbable quest to become modern France's youngest president."

"The volleyball games, played in the middle of that international crisis, were probably intended to send a message, analysts said, as the North Koreans are aware that the nuclear test site is under intense scrutiny. But what meaning the North wanted the games to convey is unclear."

"The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic -- bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles -- and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.

"President Trump is scary in many ways, but perhaps the most frightening nightmare is of him blundering into a new Korean war.

He could do nothing, but that would mean losing face and emboldening North Korea. Or he could destroy the test missile on its launchpad with a barrage of cruise missiles, blocking Pyongyang's path to a nuclear deterrent, enforcing his red line, and sending a clear message to the rest of the world.

Alas, no one has ever made money betting on North Korean restraint, and the country might respond by firing artillery at Seoul, a metropolitan area of 25 million people.

And if Trump tries to accelerate the process with a pre-emptive military strike? Then Heaven help us."

Gail Collins is one of my favorite Op-Ed writers -- she is very funny, even when the subject is as serious as this one:

"[North Korea] has a leader who is narcissistic to the point of psychosis, with a celebrity fixation and very strange haircut.

O.K., maybe not entirely unique."

[that's funny]

"Poor Sean Spicer. Every day a new official fantasy to defend. Tonight the president will go to bed and dream that he's the true heir to the principality of Liechtenstein. Tomorrow Spicer will come into the pressroom on skis and announce we're declaring war on Switzerland."

A lot of Americans liked the idea of responding to a chemical attack in Syria by bombing a Syrian air base. But if the president thought it was popular, wouldn't he get carried away? It's like praising a 4-year-old for coloring a picture, and the next thing you know he's got his crayons out, heading for the white sofa.

What we want to do is take the crayons away and murmur: 'Good boy. Now why don't you go off and nominate some ambassadors for a change'?

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

"[T]he woman, who is African-American, worked in a clerical position at the network but did not work directly for Mr. O'Reilly. The woman reported that in 2008, Mr. O'Reilly would stop by her desk and grunt like a 'wild boar'; he would also stand back to allow her to exit the elevator first and then say, 'Looking good, girl,' ... [and] leered at the woman's cleavage and legs and called her 'hot chocolate' ..."

"'We're sending an armada,' Mr. Trump said to Fox News last Tuesday ...

The problem was that the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula."

"Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention knows by now that this president and this White House intend to play by their own set of rules -- rules that in some cases come close to breaking the law and, at the very least, defy traditions of conduct and transparency Americans have come to expect from their public servants."

"We urgently need to find a peaceful solution to the North Korean conundrum, and no solution would be effective without China's tacit approval.

Here's my proposal: China would offer guaranteed protection of a denuclearized North Korea, with an agreed-upon long-term plan of economic support. The United States would recognize China's pre-eminent role in the region by committing to a gradual removal of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system from South Korea and equally gradual plan to reduce its military presence in the demilitarized zone and elsewhere in South Korea.

China's concerns about any future threat from the United States would be addressed, and the United States would be relieved of a growing concern presented by the current North Korean regime. -- Sylva Apelian, New York"